NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES: “Mobile Content
Venture” is the official name of the initiative launched by 12 broadcast groups
during the NAB Show in April. The venture was formed to create a cohesive
national business model for over-the-air mobile digital television, now being
demonstrated in Washington, D.C.

The name was released today along with an interim executive leadership team.
MCV will be led by Erik Moreno, senior vice president of corporate development
for Fox Networks Group, and Salil Dalvi, senior vide president of Mobile
Platform Development for NBC Universal Digital Distribution. Both have been appointed
interim co-general managers. They’ll be responsible for product development as
well as network planning and distribution, which will rely on broadcasters
volunteering bandwidth for transmission.

Nationwide distribution is considered crucial for the widespread adoption
necessary to sustain the service. Belo, Cox, E.W. Scripps, Fox, Gannett,
Hearst, ION, Media General, Meredith, NBC, Post-Newsweek and Raycom are on
board the venture. The local station groups, sans Fox and NBC, have also formed
a separate joint venture, Pearl Mobile DTV, through which they’ll participate
in MCV.

Dalvi and Moreno will continue in their roles at the networks while they work
out the MCV plan. The pair will work with a newly established steering
committee that includes Fox TV station CEO Jack Abernethy; News Corp. Executive
Vice President Rich Battista; David Lougee, president of Gannett Broadcasting;
Roger Keating, senior vice president of Digital Media for Hearst Television; Jean-Briac
Perrette, president of digital and affiliate distribution for NBC Universal; John
Wallace, president of NBC Local Media; and Brandon Burgess, chairman and CEO of
ION Television.

Burgess also leads the Open Mobile Video Coalition, a group that formed two
years ago to promote mobile, over-the-air DTV. The OMVC represents 860 commercial
and noncommercial TV stations across the country. The organization launched beta
services last month in Washington, D.C., via nine local TV stations broadcasting
around 20 channels. Select Sprint Mobile subscribers were supplied with
receivers for the trial.

Those receivers were recently subject of an FCC petition filed by the
manufacturers because they do not include analog reception capability. By law,
anything that decodes over-the-air DTV signals must do the same for analog
transmissions. The FCC is considering a waiver of the rule for mobile devices.